Physician Heal Thyself

You get sick. You go to the doctor. You discover he has the same illness, and he can't figure out how to heal himself. Do you stay? Or do you go find another doctor? Obviously, if the doctor can't solve his own problem, you're going to be skeptical about him solving yours.

Right?

Yeah. So this piece of spam got me laughing so hard. The sender is a website promotion company which actually confesses in their email that they aren't very good at promoting websites. DUH! Okay, well, I guess I'll let you promote my website, since you're so lousy at it!

Here's the beginning of the spam:

Dear Articlesforeducators Team,

My name is Olga and I am senior customer relations manager for Trevolta marketing service ([spammerwebsite]).

I found your website http://www.articlesforeducators.com in the sponsored links section at Google and Overture. I would like to offer you to try out our new pay-per-click system, recently launched as the main service of [spammerwebsite] search engine. Since you are familiar with pay-per-click advertisement in general and possibly have already worked with several pay-per-click engines, you'll be able to easily assess advantages of Trevolta.com pay-per-click engine.

Let me just pause to say, I have never ever ever promoted "Articles For Educators" using sponsored links in Google, Overture, or anywhere else, so I've caught them in a lie right now. And it's an odd sort of lie, too. What does it accomplish for them?

But let's forget that for now. Here's the funny part. Take a look at why they started this search engine of theirs:

We decided to launch this new service, when after a certain time of trying to promote our own website with Google and Overture, we felt there must be a way get more affordable yet more targeted traffic through PPC. For this reason, when creating Trevolta PPC we made sure it has what we felt other PPC lacked.

Think about that. They started their own search engine, because they couldn't get themselves ranked in Google and Overture. Oh. Ha ha ha. So, I should spend my money on a website promotion service which failed to promote themselves, and ended up having to spam people to get business?

I think not.

The true irony is that, since they didn't find me through "sponsored listings", that means the only reason they found me is because I did a good job promoting my website. In essence, they're saying, "You're a good website promoter and we're not. Will you hire us?"